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Pakistani Activist, 15, Is Shot by Taliban

Pakistani soldiers moved Malala Yousafzai, 14, to an army hospital in Peshawar after she was attacked by militants in the Swat Valley on Tuesday.Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Last Updated, 8:42 p.m. A spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley took responsibility for the shooting on Tuesday of a 15-year-old activist who is an outspoken advocate of education for girls. The attack on Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head on her way home from school in Mingora, the region’s main city, outraged many Pakistanis, but a Taliban spokesman told a newspaper that the group would target the girl again if she survived.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, told my colleague Declan Walsh in a telephone interview that Malala “has become a symbol of Western culture in the area” and had expressed admiration for President Obama. Speaking to Reuters, the militant acknowledged that the victim was young but insisted the attack was justified because “she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas,” referring to the ethnic group in northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan whose conservative values the Taliban claims to defend.

Another girl, one of two others wounded in the attack, said in a television interview with Pakistan’s Express News that a man had stopped the school bus and asked which girl was Malala before opening fire.

A video report from Pakistan’s Express News on the shooting of a 15-year-old activist in Pakistan’s Swat Valley on Tuesday features an interview with a wounded witness.

Pakistan’s Express Tribune reported that doctors at a hospital in Mingora said that Malala was “out of danger” because the bullet that “struck her skull and came out on the other side and hit her shoulder” had not damaged her brain. The newspaper added that the girl was later moved to Peshawar in a Pakistani Army helicopter.

But The News, a Pakistani daily, reported late Tuesday that a bullet was still lodged in her head and that arrangements were being made by the government to transport Malala abroad for emergency surgery that could not be performed at the military hospital in Peshawar. The newspaper Dawn also reported that surgeons at the military facility said “she immediately needs a sophisticated surgical procedure, which is not possible in the country,” to save her life.

Video posted on YouTube by a local news channel, apparently recorded in the hospital in Mingora, showed distressing scenes of the young girl being treated in a chaotic environment, surrounded by police officers and cameras, wrapped in a bloody sheet. The military’s press office later released photographs of soldiers evacuating Malala and tending to her in another hospital.

Malala’s uncle said that her condition remained critical, in a telephone interview with Nazrana Yousufzai, a journalist from Swat who now works for Voice of America’s Pashto-language service in Washington.

I have just spoken to Ahmed shah a closed family member of #Malalai Yousfzai, Says According to Doctors Her condition is critical. Godbless

Late Tuesday, Rehman Malik, a senior politician in the ruling party, reported on Twitter that he had obtained a passport for Malala and an air ambulance was standing by to take her out of the country for treatment. Imran Khan, an opposition leader whose advocacy of negotiations with the Taliban made him a target for criticism after the shooting, wrote on Twitter that he had “offered to pick up all expenses of young Malala Yousafzai’s treatment here and abroad.”

Aleem Maqbool, a BBC correspondent in Pakistan, reported on Twitter that he had asked the Taliban militants to clarify their position on killing women, given that they had previously described it as haram, or sinful, for Muslims. A spokesman for the group replied that Malala “had harmed the mujahideen by her words. We held a shura and declared killing her was allowed in Islam.”

Malala became well known in Pakistan as the author of a blog for the BBC’s Urdu-language Web site, Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl, in which she chronicled life under Taliban rule, after the Swat Valley was overrun by the Islamist militants in 2009. “At that time,” she wrote later, “some of us would go to school in plain clothes, not in school uniform, just to pretend we are not students, and we hid our books under our shawls.”

Pakistani activists and bloggers expressed their concern and anger online at the shooting.

Malala Yousufzai stood up to the horrors of the Pakistani Taliban, in Swat, before the rest of the country had woken up to the danger.

My colleague Adam Ellick interviewed Malala extensively in 2009, for a documentary about her father’s struggle to reopen a school for girls in Swat after the Pakistani military regained control of the valley from the Taliban. (Adam has just filed a new post for The Lede, recalling how Malala and her father became his friends during the course of that shoot, and after it was finished.)

Video

Class Dismissed: Malala’s Story

A 2009 documentary by Adam B. Ellick profiled Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl whose school was shut down by the Taliban. Ms. Yousafzai was shot by a gunman on Oct. 9, 2012.

A video report from Britian’s Channel 4 News on the shooting of Malala Yousafzai.

In addition to making appearances in the international media, Malala has been a frequent subject of profiles and interviews on Pakistani television. Last year, in an interview with a blog dedicated to positive news about Pakistan, Malala explained that she had decided to focus on a career politics, because her country was in need of good leaders.

In an interview in 2011, Malala Yousafzai explained that she had decided to go into politics, to help lead Pakistan.

Even after the Taliban were pushed out of Swat by the military, the girl remained a fierce critic of their ideology. Looking back on the period of Taliban control, Malala told the BBC last year:

The situation in Swat was normal until the Taliban appeared and destroyed the peace of Swat.

They started their inhuman activities, they slaughtered people in the squares of Mingora and they killed so many innocent people. Their first target was schools, especially girls schools. They blasted so many girls schools — more than 400 schools and more than 50,000 students suffered under the Taliban.

We were afraid the Taliban might throw acid on our faces or might kidnap us. They were barbarians, they could do anything.

A BBC News video report on Malala broadcast last year included footage of her reading from the diary she kept under the pen name Gul Makai when she was 11.

Correction: October 9, 2012Because of an editing error, the original caption for the photograph at the top of this post, showing Malala Yousafzai being carried from a military helicopter in Peshawar, repeated a mistake in the description provided by the Pakistani Army, which released the image. The attack took place in the Swat Valley, not in Peshawar.

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